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1), there was no suggestion that the back-turned figure in the black topcoat was in any sense a proxy for the artist. When Magritte first painted a man in a bowler, in Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (The Musings of a Solitary Wanderer) (1926, fig.
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It deserves consideration not only because Magritte was an artist consumed by the mechanisms and capriciousness of signification, but especially because it helps to reveal how he affected the interpretation of his works after they were done, shifting their public understanding long after the paint was dry and the easel and brushes had been put away. The process by which the bowler man passed from anonymous, generic male figure to stand-in for a painter with a distinctly anonymous style is worthy of attention. It was only in these final years of the artist’s life that the bowler figure came to be understood as an alter ego and even, at times, a self-portrait. 1 Yet even though the character originated in Magritte’s early career, all but a few of the paintings with this imagery were made in the 1950s and 1960s. If we include variations such as those seen in Golconde (Golconda) (1955), the tally increases by an additional dozen pictures. He painted the theme in its classic forms-a single or doubled figure facing forward or backward-no fewer than thirty-six times in oil and seventeen times in gouache between 19.
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The bowler hat, known in French as chapeau melon, is so closely associated with René Magritte that it may come as a surprise to note that the bowler-hatted man did not always appear as an identifiable, regularly recurring motif in his oeuvre.